So far Lady Elburne’s tact and discipline had been highly successful.  One morning, in May, Ferdinand, strolling with Rose down the garden made a positive appeal to her common sense and friendly feeling; by which she understood that he wanted her consent to his marriage with her.

Rose answered: 

‘Who would have me?’

Ferdinand spoke pretty well, and ultimately got possession of her hand.  She let him keep it, thinking him noble for forgetting that another had pressed it before him.

Some minutes later the letters were delivered.  One of them contained Juliana’s dark-winged missive.

‘Poor, poor Juley!’ said Rose, dropping her head, after reading all that was on the crumpled leaf with an inflexible face.  And then, talking on, long low sighs lifted her bosom at intervals.  She gazed from time to time with a wistful conciliatory air on Ferdinand.  Rushing to her chamber, the first cry her soul framed was: 

‘He did not kiss me!’

The young have a superstitious sense of something incontestably true in the final protestations of the dead.  Evan guiltless! she could not quite take the meaning this revelation involved.  That which had been dead was beginning to move within her; but blindly:  and now it stirred and troubled; now sank.  Guiltless all she had thought him!  Oh! she knew she could not have been deceived.  But why, why had he hidden his sacrifice from her?

‘It is better for us both, of course,’ said Rose, speaking the world’s wisdom, parrot-like, and bursting into tears the next minute.  Guiltless, and gloriously guiltless! but nothing—­nothing to her!

She tried to blame him.  It would not do.  She tried to think of that grovelling loathsome position painted to her by Lady Elburne’s graphic hand.  Evan dispersed the gloomy shades like sunshine.  Then in a sort of terror she rejoiced to think she was partially engaged to Ferdinand, and found herself crying again with exultation, that he had not kissed her:  for a kiss on her mouth was to Rose a pledge and a bond.

The struggle searched her through:  bared her weakness, probed her strength; and she, seeing herself, suffered grievously in her self-love.  Am I such a coward, inconstant, cold? she asked.  Confirmatory answers coming, flung her back under the shield of Ferdinand if for a moment her soul stood up armed and defiant, it was Evan’s hand she took.

To whom do I belong? was another terrible question.  In her ideas, if Evan was not chargeable with that baseness which had sundered them he might claim her yet, if he would.  If he did, what then?  Must she go to him?

Impossible:  she was in chains.  Besides, what a din of laughter there would be to see her led away by him.  Twisting her joined hands:  weeping for her cousin, as she thought, Rose passed hours of torment over Juliana’s legacy to her.